Disciplining the Holocaust /

Ball's title refers to her goal of assuring well-developed theoretical (chiefly Foucault, Adorno, Habermas, Freud) models for examining the Holocaust to protect against "potential trivializations" in the future. In the first chapter, Ball (English and film studies, Univ. of Alberta) examines the polarized reception of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (CH, Jul'96, 33-6461), insisting that good history must have strong substantive, epistemological, moral, and stylistic criteria as the basis of casting judgments about histories of the Holocaust. She then looks at Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (and concludes that his minimalist conscientious remembrance of the Holocaust is appropriate); Jean-Francois Lyotard's facing off Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics (1973) and Jacques Derrida's deconstructionism (to look at Auschwitz as a wound that resists all attempts to give it conventional meaning); "the conditions and limits of the psychoanalytic framework for evaluating traumatic affect in discourse about the Holocaust"; and (citing Freud) memory formation of the Holocaust to show how fantasies can lead to sympathies with the victims and how the compassionate listener may become the clinical voyeur in approaching the study of the Holocaust. A complex book about a difficult topic. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students through faculty. W. Lagerwey Elmhurst College